Text: Foe by Coetzee
Task: Analysing Chapter IV

OBJECTIVES

Cultural:post-colonial and moderm writing
Intertextual:l inks with othe forms and texts
Linguistic: practicing the writing skill

In this chapter Coetzee wants to explain to the reader  the sense of the novel and probably the meaning of the title Foe

In this pages the narrator is no longer Susan Barton but  an unknown narrator that does not tell us about his/her identity .

The chapter starts exactly like the  third one  that is  it starts with the same words " The staircase is dark and mean" ; maybe the narrator refers to something that is  difficult and dangerous.

This chapter starts with the  description of a woman who is sleeping using a lot of details and later on the attention focusses on Friday, a black man and through the description of his mouth  we can understand that he has not got his tongue and so he cannot speak; now we understand that the only person who can tell us the  story ias it really happened is Friday but he is unable .

This fact is explained thanks to description of sounds that arise from Friday's mouth  or better the narrator imagines that form Friday's mouth  the sound of the island from which all the story originated is coming out, that could be the truth. But the story stops before the truth comes to flounce.

In this chapter  Coetzee wants to underline the importance of language and of the woman.

In fact in this book, differently from Daniel's novel, Friday is considered the point of reference for the whole story, he is only the voice of the truth and he isn't only a servant that must be subject to a colonizer (Robinson); consequently Coetzee  connects his novel to a variety problems like racism, colonialism and using a new narrator the position of women in his society.